by Alex Marks
Shit, fucking shit. My motorbike was, at this moment, leaning up against the curb outside a grotty student house in late April. Dave, the only person likely to open the door to me without question, was with me in the Netherlands and wouldn't be back until tomorrow. I couldn't even get into the lab overnight without my key fob. I was on my own, and I realised that I had never felt really alone before. I had always felt, no matter how faintly, that there was a connection with people or places around me, anchoring me. Now there was nothing. Sarah had been everything to me, and I had nobody else to fall back on now. Cold inched into my belly, freezing my panic, and although I tried to calm down and think I just kept coming back to this empty Sunday night street with nowhere to go.
I walked slowly down the road. I should have checked my pockets sooner, but that creep Tony had knocked the wind out of me and I hadn't been thinking straight. Automatically my hand reached up to rub the bruise on my forehead that was now – about an hour later, as far as it was concerned – starting to make its presence felt. It burned, and the burning cut through the cold and the panic and ignited a tiny flicker of something else in my mind. What had Hasan and Tony intended to do if they'd caught me this morning? Beat me? Kill me? Naismith had killed Sarah, I knew that with a certainty: he'd chased her down that road, pushing her with his fuck-off car, and making her crash. In my mind's eye I saw the tree shuddering and the street flooding red from the brake lights of the big Audi. I closed my eyes, and here it came: a huge rush of rage, and I welcomed it like never before. It dissolved all my fear and my doubts, it curled itself around me like a friend, and I realised that I wasn't alone after all, I wasn't just another washed up loser with nowhere to go: I had a purpose. There was one other place where I could pitch up at eleven o'clock on a wet Sunday night: my parents-in-law.
The darkened street was empty now, with only the gleaming, steamy windows of pubs and take-aways showing signs of life. I swung the rucksack onto my back and walked with determination down the pavement – it was a good couple of miles to Summertown from here but I had the time. I'd get there in the small hours of the morning, and I smiled at the thought of the wake up I was planning to give my in-laws. Hardly any cars were passing now, and so I jumped when a beaten up Corsa swerved past me and parked haphazardly next to the curb outside a pizza place. A wave of powerful gansta rap boomed out into the quiet street as the skinny white kid driving swung open the door, and leaving the engine running, trotted through the rain into the take-away – an empty insulated bag hanging from his hand.
I stopped, and watched him through the foggy glass, fist-bumping the guy behind the counter and chatting as more pizza boxes, greasy and heavy, were slid into the bag ready for his next delivery. The car, pounding out its repetitive beat, idled, unattended.
Without really thinking about it I swung myself into the driver's seat, chucked the rucksack into the passenger foot well, and slammed the door. The delivery boy must have heard the sound because he shot out of the take-away and ran round up to the car, banging on the back as I wrenched the hand brake and moved off. On impulse, I slammed on the brakes again and threw the gear stick into reverse – I could see his face lit suddenly by the white lights, and he scrambled a few steps backwards as I revved the engine, glaring at his fearful expression in the rear view mirror. He put his hands up and backed onto the pavement and I put the car into gear again and stamped on the accelerator.
Good call, you fucking idiot, I thought, shooting down the empty street at forty, and then I was round the corner and gunning it past the new University and on down Headington Hill. I slowed to the speed limit and took a look around my prize – a piece of shit car if ever there was one. Duck tape seemed to be holding most of it together, and the stereo seemed to be the only bit that was really working. I switched off the rap and revelled in the silence for a minute. My rage, my new friend, applauded me for this coup, this two-fingers at my situation. I smiled.
I pulled through the traffic lights at St Clements and then onto the High Street opposite the darkened windows of Magdelen College. There was a pizza box on the passenger seat and I flipped it open to reveal a half-eaten pepperoni, still faintly warm. Delivery man's perks, I presumed, taking a piece and shoving it into my mouth. I hadn't realised how hungry I was – but I had completely lost track of how long it had been since I'd eaten or slept. The food and the warmth from the battered air vents perked me up and I felt energised. My mind cleared and the pain of the day fell away, leaving only a hardened core of intent, a concentration of rage, nestling in my soul like a blood diamond.
Without any of the usual traffic it took no time at all to swing round Long Wall Street and past the University Park onto the Banbury Road. The lab building loomed huge and dark, no lights showing. It didn't feel part of me anymore. Summertown was all but empty, and in minutes I'd drawn to a stop in the little car park behind the shops. It meant a few minutes' walk to the Hollands' house, but it was easier to park here than try and find a space amongst the Range Rovers and Saabs on the North Oxford streets. I grabbed my bag up from the foot well, and a tattered baseball cap with NYC embroidered on the front came up too. It was pretty grimy, but it would keep the rain off, so I shoved it on my head and got out of the car – putting the keys into my pocket,
just in case.
I walked away from the shops and turned past the church into the quiet of Lonsdale Road. The large, expensive houses were darkened, only the twinkle of alarm boxes mounted high on the eaves showing signs of life. Richard and Maggie lived at 66, at the far end, and as I walked I played over in my mind what I was going to say, how I was going to persuade them to let me in. Once I was in the house...
I crossed the road, and covered the last few metres to the gate and stopped dead. The jag wasn't there. I couldn't understand it, at this time of night they would be in – the realisation impacted: they would be at the hospital, waiting to be told that Sarah hadn't survived the crash. I pictured them in the tatty NHS relatives' room, the kindly doctor breaking the bad news, their dignified acceptance – how soon after the accident had Naismith called them, I wondered? Long enough to get their game faces on, the practised hypocrisy of perverts. I clenched my teeth to stifle a scream of frustration and rage. A light flicked on in a house opposite and I automatically jogged up the drive and into the blackness of the garden, waiting for the window to go blank once again before I moved. In the dark I felt lost again, disconnected. I couldn't see myself and I began to wonder if I was actually here. Tiredness warped the edges of my vision, flickering lights in the gloom, and I felt weightless, a balloon of consciousness, not a real person at all. I bit my lip, hard, using the sharp pain to anchor me down until I felt real again. I was still stuck, though, with no juice to recharge my time kit and no money or ID to reclaim myself as a normal citizen.
I moved slowly up the crackling gravel path and peered through the glazed front door at a slice of hall: a narrow table with letters on it, coats on hooks, an umbrella propped up by the stairs. Everything looked so familiar, so normal, I'd been here a million times and had never realised how false it all was. An urge to smash and destroy and make everything as ugly as it was underneath took hold of me and I snatched up the cast iron boot beetle from the step and lifted it overhead. But then I noticed the glint of green on the alarm panel, set just inside the door. I dropped the heavy iron shape onto the ground; in this area, the police would be on me in minutes.
Exhaustion knocked me off my feet, and I sat down on the damp ground against the door step. Flashes of Sarah in her car, head down on the steering wheel, dead, rushed into my mind and filled my eyes, whether they were open or closed. She felt as far away as she had ever been, closed off, unreachable. Every time I thought I'd be able to reach out and save her, but every time it was snatched away, walled off, made impossible. I'd come back to find her, but I seemed to have lost me, snapped the invisible cord linking me to myself, leaving me just an angry ghost, bodiless, impotent.
For a long time I sa
t in the wet, and I think I must have dropped into a blank sleep. A door slammed somewhere, and my head shot up thinking it was Richard and Maggie coming back, but there was still no car on the drive. I glanced instinctively at the next door house, but it was invisible – blocked by the dark shape of the garage. I straightened up, the electricity of an idea shooting through me.
In the darkness I felt my way across the drive and round to the side of the garage building. From memory as much as anything I found the door, and then I walked my hands down the door frame and across the ground until they closed on an irregular concrete shape. It was a fake 'decorative rock' that housed the spare key – a stupid Christmas present that Sarah had bought her father years ago. I grimaced at the memory even as my fingers fumbled it upside down and plucked the key from its little hidey hole. It took another few seconds to locate the keyhole, but then I was in.
I snapped on the light, confident that it couldn't be seen from the street, and surveyed my father-in-law's tidy domain of expensive gardening equipment. The sit-on mower, the top-of-the-range hedge cutter, even that stupid fucking garden hoover were lined up neatly, all clean and shiny. The workbench was spotless, tools hanging on the board behind it, nails and screws in stacked plastic drawers not strewn around like in my own workshop. Then I saw what I had come for – a group of rechargeable batteries, clustered around a set of wall sockets, plugged in and showing an array of green LEDs.
I slammed the rucksack onto the workbench and pulled out the time kit. With everything laid out so neatly it took no time at all to locate a pair of pliers and strip out the connections to the now-dead batteries, leaving the wires as long as I could. Then I grabbed six of the heavy cubed power packs from their cradles and began wiring them together in sequence. As I worked, I felt myself float away again, my busy hands seeming to belong to someone else, or just themselves, as they cut and trimmed and twisted and joined the batteries together, then disconnected the cut-out switch I'd installed – there would be no going back this time. Remotely, I felt my mind begin to calculate the cumulative charge based on the information printed on each battery. There would be more than enough to get me back to earlier today, and get Sarah away from here before she could ever go to that fucking house.
Anger jammed me back into myself, and my fingers stilled on the wires as I thought of Sarah's video message and her determination to face up to the darkest place in her memory. She was always so brave, setting out to challenge the impossible – whether it was homelessness, or poverty, or the rotten heart of her own family. I wished she'd told me what had really happened to Helen and her, wished she'd told me years ago so I could have beaten the living daylights out of Richard fucking Holland. And yet there was the irony of the universe: lovely, brave Sarah was dead and Richard and Maggie, paedophiles, liars, murderers, lived on.
I glanced down and jumped to see that, whilst I'd been lost in thought, I'd also been doing calculations on an old envelope that had been lying on the workbench. I leaned over and saw what I had worked out. It could be done, it could be done and I'd have enough charge to get back. I could stop all this sickness and perversion at source, I could really change things and free Sarah from all these years' of pain. My mouth went dry, but my inner rage just smiled. Why else go to all this trouble? it asked, why not take that final step? I looked at the bag, and knew what remained inside.
I took out the gun, checked the magazine, and zipped it safely inside my jacket. I jammed the bundle of batteries into the rucksack, and laid the rest of the time kit on top. I closed the bag, leaving only the timer visible, and dialled in the figures I'd just worked out. I pushed in my earbuds and selected a track on the iPod, then walked to the door of the garage and stepped outside into the dark and the rain. Everything had faded, all I could hear was the sound of my heart pounding as I twisted my hands into the straps, heaved the bag onto my shoulder, and pushed the button. Then my world dissolved.
Friday, 28 February 1985. 20:21
The white flash ate my vision, and I blinked and blinked to clear my eyes, forcing the blindness away. Something seemed to be wrong with my hearing, like I was underwater, as if all sounds were coming from a great distance and I shook my head to try and clear it. My mind was foggy, there was something I was going to do... The rucksack slipped in my arms and I caught it again with a jump; my brain seemed to catch up and sound and vision snapped into focus with a migraine-like intensity.
I see trees of green, red roses too.
I see them bloom, for me and you.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
I squinted into the darkness, cold but not raining now, and tried to breathe and calm my heart which I could feel pounding in my chest like an engine trying to shake itself to pieces.
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white.
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
Ahead of me lay Richard and Maggie's house, the same house as I'd just left, but not the same. The door was different, this one being older and painted a nasty bottle green. The windows were steamy, single-glazed, with green painted frames, and turning slightly I could make out an A plate Volvo estate standing in the driveway. It looked new. In my ears I could hear my heart rate speed up again. I'd done it, I'd done it. I swivelled the bag around and looked at the timer: four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Time enough.
The colours of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces, of people going by,
I see friends shaking hands, saying "How d'you do?"
They're really saying, "I love you".
I pulled the cap down on my head and moved across to the door. On impulse, I turned the handle and it opened straight away – I stepped into the hallway, standing on a garish patterned carpet, looking at two identical tricycles standing next to the stairs, children's coats on the pegs near the door. Inside this house were Sarah and Helen, aged about six. I hoped I was in time, that they were too young for... I felt that familiar kick of anger in the middle of my chest, and I reached inside my jacket to grasp the heavy handle of the gun. I pulled it out, and dropped my arm down by my side. I couldn't hear anything in the house, so I took a breath and walked down the hallway and towards the kitchen. As I passed the stairs, something made me look up, and there was a small girl, dressed in pyjamas with pink rabbits on, standing gazing down at me. We stared at each other – I couldn't tell if it was Sarah or Helen, the expression in her round blue eyes unreadable.
I hear babies cry, I watch them grow,
They'll learn much more, than I'll ever know.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
'Ssh, go up to bed,' I whispered. For a long second I thought the child would ignore me, but then she turned and toddled back up onto the landing and out of sight. Had it been Sarah? So small and innocent, with all that pain to come. My heart pounded in my ear in a heavy drumbeat of rage, and I lifted the gun to waist height and stepped into the kitchen.
Maggie was sitting at the table, a glass of wine in front of her, reading a magazine. Richard, tall and handsome, resplendent in a green paisley shirt, was straightening up from scraping some food into the bin. He stood and stared at me, plate and knife in hand, and at the table Maggie froze with her wineglass halfway to her mouth.
Yes, I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.
I saw his mouth move as he spoke, but I couldn't hear what he said. A hissing white noise of rage was filling my head, wondering whether he'd already started his disgusting games, whether Maggie had already agreed to sacrifice their children. At the thought of his wife I lifted the gun and turned, seeing her expression morph from startled to alarmed, and then the trigger pulled and her head snapped backwards in a red cloud of blood. There was no sound. I turned to him, and he made a step towards me, stupidly still holding the plate, but the bullet caught him in the upper chest and he folded backwards almost elegantly, hitting
the side of the worktop and collapsing onto the dark green lino.
Oh yeah
I could hear gasping, but I think that was me. I took a step forward to look my father-in-law in the eye as he lay bleeding on the floor. I pointed the gun at his forehead but he suddenly lashed out with one leg, and I fell beside him, the rucksack spilling heavily from my shoulder and twirling across the floor. He was grabbing and clawing at my back, but I could see the timer start to make its final ten second countdown so I shoved viciously, knocking him onto his back, giving me the space to turn and fire the gun again and again until he'd stopped moving. Then I slipped and scrabbled across the slippery floor and reached for the bag, my fingers almost grazing it as the white flash enveloped everything.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wednesday, 11 March 2015. 11.30
A pleasant chiming sound roused me from the deepest of sleeps, and I opened my eyes to see a smiling air steward shaking my arm.
'We're just approaching London Heathrow now, sir,' he said, 'if you could move your seat into the upright position.'